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Comment by chrisseaton | Hacker News Reader

Maybe criminals in the US carry and use guns because they fear violence from the police?

If you think the police are going to kill you either way, you might as well go out shooting! In the UK you know the police are going to respectfully arrest you and treat you well, so might as well give in rather than escalate it to a firefight.

But generally I think it's crazy that the police in the US are armed. Most policing doesn't need lethal weaponry, and community officers shouldn't be armed. Leave guns to specialist units when required.

I know Floyd wasn't killed with a gun, but I think disarming the police would be the right response and first step towards reducing police violence, as it de-escalates every interaction.

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> In the UK you know the police are going to respectfully arrest you and treat you well

I agree this will be the case most of the time, but it's worth pointing out this is not always the case.

The MET in particular are rather infamous for their level of institutionalised racism, which while undoubtedly better than it used to be, still leaves much to be considered.

Anecdotally, I have family members in the police force in London and in Scotland. The ones in London like to regale others with tales of how much they enjoy donning their riot gear and using any excuse to batter people, especially if they are black. The ones in Scotland tell of how prisoners are routinely abused - usually at a "minor" level, such as slapping a prisoner for no reason, but in one indicent a prisoner's head was smashed off a radiator.

> "The ones in London like to regale others with tales of how much they enjoy donning their riot gear and using any excuse to batter people, especially if they are black"

If this is true then you need to immediately report it to MPS DPS and IOPC.

It is true, but I last heard this a few years ago, and have absolutely no evidence. One of them has also since retired from the MET.

What do you mean you have no evidence? I thought they said this directly to you?

That would be my word against theirs - that is not evidence that means anything.

Yes it absolutely is evidence that means something. You have direct first hand evidence of racism. Even if it's not sufficient for action on its own it is still incredibly valuable evidence that may well be strengthened by other people's accounts.

Unless you are lying, you absolutely have a civic duty to report what you heard.

Mate, I don't know what's up with the "If this is true" and "Unless you are lying". What possible incentive could I have for making up such a thing?

> you absolutely have a civic duty to report

Real-life is just a tad more complicated than that.

As much as I abhor what they've said, they are family, and I'd liklely be ostracised by other close family members. In any case, effectively the evidence is my word against theirs from something they said a few years ago. Something they could simply claim didn't happen, or that they were just kidding around. If I was going to report it, the time to do so would have been then. Should I have done so? I battled with decision at that at the time, but ultimately didn't for the reasons I already mentioned.

As I said, it's complicated.

Sorry, I didn't mean to say you are lying, I meant that in the sense people say stuff like "Unless you're writing this from beyond the grave then...". Reading it back I can see how it read.

I was trying to say that you had no reason for not reporting it (based on what you had said - it's too old, it's my word against theirs etc).

Obviously now you've suggested you have your own personal reasons. That's completely different and totally up to you. I was only commenting on the objections you had raised previously, which suggested you thought your information had no value, when it does.

> In the UK you know the police are going to respectfully arrest you and treat you well,

UK police are racist and they subject black people to disproportionate use of police powers.

Yes, I think it's important us in the UK not to be too self congratulatory on these issues. The UK have a similar racial skew in the number of people imprisoned from BAME communities compared to their representation in the overall population.

The reasons for this are many fold, ranging from poorer opportunities and education to more severe punishments for crimes committed.

That said, extrajudicial killings are extraordinarily rare in the UK. I don't think anyone, even someone from those communities, would ever expect to die during an interaction with the police in normal circumstances. While in the US it's becoming clear that there is a real fear of any police interaction being escalated to that point.

Lethal violence is rarer, because UK police tend not to carry guns and are trained in de-escalation and to only use guns as a last resort.

It does happen though, and it disproportionately happens to black people. https://twitter.com/korrinesky/status/1267085008210210816?s=...

Moving away from law enforcement to mental health treatment we see black people are more likely to be detained under the mental health act, spend longer in detention, are more likely to be on CTOs, are more likely to be on forensic sections. In hospital they're more likely to be subjected to seclusion, restraint, and rapid tranquillisation.

> Maybe criminals in the US carry and use guns because they fear violence from the police?

Criminals carry guns because other criminals carry guns, and because prospective victims generally do not carry guns.

Most criminals are not going to be interested to pull a gun on the police. If they can make the gun disappear when encountering the police, they will.

> In the UK you know the police are going to respectfully arrest you and treat you well, so might as well give in rather than escalate it to a firefight.

In the UK you also don't face the same penalties. If it's twenty-five to life, people are likely to resist arrest by all means.

> But generally I think it's crazy that the police in the US are armed. Most policing doesn't need lethal weaponry, and community officers shouldn't be armed. Leave guns to specialist units when required.

Sure, most policing doesn't need arms, but most behavior doesn't need policing either.

If you were a police officer, would you, unarmed, engage another person wielding a hatchet? I'd say that's unlikely. Would you even take the job if you were unarmed?

Of course that means police kill/injure fewer people, but they also prevent fewer people from killing or injuring others.

> I know Floyd wasn't killed with a gun, but I think disarming the police would be the right response and first step towards reducing police violence, as it de-escalates every interaction.

It would de-escalate in the sense that there won't be any policing. Officers aren't going to engage a potentially armed criminal with just pepper spray.

If you could assume that the person you are trying to arrest most likely does not carry a gun, like in Europe, it would be different. That's just not going to happen in the US.

> If you were a police officer, would you, unarmed, engage another person wielding a hatchet? I'd say that's unlikely. Would you even take the job if you were unarmed?

Great example! Here's how the UK engage someone wielding a machete, without guns or any other weapons beside extendable batons.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9mzPj_IaMzY

They try to deescalate, they bring in reinforcements, they surround, then they disarm him using shields, not weapons, and he survives to stand a fair trial. No guns needed.

And if they thought they couldn't arrest him using shields they could call in a specialist firearms unit, who are specifically trained, authorised, and accountable.

This is ridiculous. You have six or seven officers trying to verbally reason with the screaming guy. Then, at an unspecified later time, you have about twenty to thirty officers subduing the guy.

Look, in this case maybe the screaming guy didn't actually intend to hurt anyone. You can tell by the fact that he isn't actually attacking. There also weren't any victims or bystanders involved.

Now, what happens if somebody actually tries to assault people? The perpetrator gets shot from a safe distance when those "special units" finally arrive:

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-50594810

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-51349664

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/mar/09/westminster-...

> This is ridiculous.

In the US, this man would be dead. Here, he survived. That's not ridiculous.

> Now, what happens if somebody actually tries to assault people? The perpetrator gets shot from a safe distance, when those "special units" finally arrive:

Yes - that's how it should be. Leave an actual firefight to specially appointed marksman with specialist weapons, not day-to-day officers waving pistols around. And they don't need those weapons when attending other incidents.

> In the US, this man would be dead. Here, he survived.

Well alright, that's one machete-wielding life that was saved. How many non-machete-wielding lives are lost by having an underpowered police force?

I guess we'll never know.

> That's not ridiculous.

It's ridiculous that it takes six or seven officers so long to neutralize the threat, which may not even have been a real threat.

> Yes - that's how it should be. Leave an actual firefight to specially appointed marksman with specialist weapons, not day-to-day officers waving pistols around. And they don't need those weapons when attending other incidents.

So, you get called to a minor domestic disturbance, the unarmed cops show up and it turns out that the guy in question "upgraded" to a kitchen knife. They'll better be good at keeping him occupied with trivia questions until the properly equipped force shows up.

I'm sure there's a trade-off between having police officers armed and dangerous versus having them be harmless. However, most countries in Europe - even those with low crime rates - choose to arm their officers. Deadly incidents remain rare:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_firearm_use_by_country

> It's ridiculous that it takes six or seven officers so long to neutralize the threat, which may not even have been a real threat.

So just kill people to save a handful of officers having to spend 15 minutes sorting a situation out?

> So, you get called to a minor domestic disturbance, the unarmed cops show up and it turns out that the guy in question "upgraded" to a kitchen knife. They'll better be good at keeping him occupied with trivia questions until the properly equipped force shows up.

How do you think it works in practice in the UK at the moment? If someone attacks you with a kitchen knife you can defend yourself and arrest them using a baton or a Tazer - you don't need a gun that's an insane murderous overreaction.

Our rate of both people killed by the police, and people killed by other people, is very low. Learn from what we're doing.

> So just kill people to save a handful of officers having to spend 15 minutes sorting a situation out?

That's a false dichotomy. What if it had been only two officers? That would be the situation if there happened to be a patrol around.

How do you know how the crazy guy would've reacted when facing a gun? Perhaps he would have surrendered.

What about the officer's safety? Having a gun doesn't mean you have to shoot it, it means you have better means to defend yourself and others.

The fact that almost all other police forces in Europe have guns but then tend to not fire them at people tells me that guns are not the problem.

Either way, I'm not willing to put the lives of police officers on the line just to save a couple of machete-wielding crazy people from a "suicide by cop" situation.

> How do you think it works in practice in the UK at the moment? If someone attacks you with a kitchen knife you can defend yourself and arrest them using a baton or a Tazer - you don't need a gun that's an insane murderous overreaction.

No it isn't. If you are getting attacked with a knife, you and or other person, officer or not, are morally and legally entitled to defend yourself and others with lethal force.

For your own safety, don't bring a baton to a knife fight. You can not intervene at a distance and you're risking your life.

As for Tazers, they don't have the same psychological impact as a gun and they have limited range. You're welcome to use them, but I wouldn't put my or any officer's body on the line just to prevent the attacker from harm.

> I guess we'll never know.

Statistics give clues, and strongly suggest the method is quite effective at saving non-machete-wielding lives.

> It's ridiculous that it takes six or seven officers so long to neutralize the threat, which may not even have been a real threat.

I think what you're implying here is that it's ridiculous to spend a few hours of a few officers work day to save a life.

Better to kill someone, at least it's over quickly and doesn't need as much... salary?

> They'll better be good at keeping him occupied with trivia questions until the properly equipped force shows up.

The point of the video is that, indeed, they are effective at keeping someone occupied until the properly equipped force shows up, and that it is possible to do that without just killing people when they are freaking out.

It is hardly just trivia questions. If you were paying attention to the video, the positioning of the cars and officers was intentional, to contain the situation while de-escalating it.

> I think what you're implying here is that it's ridiculous to spend a few hours of a few officers work day to save a life.

No, it's ridiculous to keep a threat going for so long. Remember that it is a threat? For how long exactly should these officers be expected to have a machete wielded at their face?

> Better to kill someone, at least it's over quickly and doesn't need as much... salary?

That's not how it would work in a standoff like this. First, you present the gun. That might change the perpetrator's mind. Then, you fire a warning shot. That might change the perpetrator's mind. Then, you shoot at the legs. If that doesn't change the perpetrator's mind, it's going to seriously impede their ability to cause harm.

If the perpetrator chooses to initiate an assault, all bets are off. They're getting shot, but also injury to others is likely going to be prevented.

> The point of the video is that, indeed, they are effective at keeping someone occupied until the properly equipped force shows up, and that it is possible to do that without just killing people when they are freaking out.

How do you know that this was effective? Show me a situation with an attacker actually ready to initiate an assault. The situation couldn't have been brought under control. For example:

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/mar/22/police-briti...

https://news.sky.com/story/police-officer-critical-after-bei...

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-49273979

https://www.standard.co.uk/news/crime/man-charged-stabbing-p...

* I guess we'll never know.*

We do know, if you'd care to find out, because homicide and suicide rates are significantly lower in the UK and other countries without armed police than the US.

A domestic is a perfect example of a situation where coming in with guns will get people killed.

> We do know, if you'd care to find out, because homicide and suicide rates are significantly lower in the UK and other countries without armed police than the US.

That's not how you know anything. First of all, the vast majority of countries around the world have armed police, so there's very few samples to work with.

Of course you'll have trouble finding any country with a high homicide rate where the police isn't armed, but you can easily find countries where homicides are extremely rare and police are still armed, for example Japan.

Suicide is mostly cultural. Korea, a country with extremely low crime rates has a very high suicide rate. In the Philippines, police are literally executing suspects in the streets, yet the suicide rate is very low. In Syria, a war torn country, suicide is even lower than that.

The rules about who gets engaged and for what seem to vary. The most astonishing thing is the number of black people who've been killed for maybe having something that looked like a gun, then a bunch of armed protestors occupy a government building during the "war on terror" without so much as a single teargas round being fired against them?

https://www.businessinsider.com/michigan-open-carry-laws-leg...

I would imagine criminals carry guns because it is easier to make their victims hand over their valuables or submit to being raped.

You can do this in UK, where weapons look like this: https://twitter.com/mpsregentspark/status/974645778558980096

But in places with criminals being heavily armed, having unarmed police, just makes the police more vulnerable.

But my thesis is that the criminals are heavily armed because they know that the police are violent. If the police were less violent, the criminals may see less need to arm themselves.

In the US a criminal needs to be ready to defend themselves to the death in any interaction with the police. In the UK, they don't.

I'm not sure if that's a valid point... i was always under the impression, that most of the violence in "violent cities" is due to violent gang, and that gang members are armed because they have to deal with other criminals/gangs (eg. if you sell drugs, to protect yourself and your drugs from being stolen, or to have "leverage" when racketeering, fighthing for "teritory", etc).

So why are police carrying guns outside of these violent cities?

Why does a police officer in a nice suburban area who attends things like noisy parties... carry a lethal firearm? That's absolutely crazy to me, and should be to everyone else.

Because if something does happen there, they use the gun for their protection. Same as in Germany (where the police is also armed). And pretty much every other country, even very peaceful ones, except probably UK.

> Because if something does happen there, they use the gun for their protection.

But this is (literally) overkill in my opinion. You could justify a flamethrower by saying 'they'd use it for their protection'. Most community police officers do not need to carry lethal weapons as they do not need that level of protection. They're patrolling communities, not war zones.

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